National Book Awards longlists include new works by Angela Flournoy, Susan Choi and Yiyun Li

By Canadian Press on September 12, 2025.

NEW YORK (AP) — New fiction by Angela Flournoy and Susan Choi, a memoir of tragedy by Yiyun Li and a novel in translation by Nobel laureate Han Kang were among the nominees announced this week for the long lists of the National Book Awards.

The National Book Foundation announced 10 books in each of five categories — fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translation and young people’s literature. The categories will be narrowed to five finalists on Oct. 7, and winners will be announced at a Nov. 19 dinner ceremony in Manhattan, when the foundation also will present honorary awards to author George Saunders and author-publisher Roxane Gay.

Choi’s “Flashlight” is her first novel since 2019, when she won the National Book Award for “Trust Exercise.” Flournoy’s “The Wilderness” came out a decade after she was a National Book Award finalist for “The Turner House.” Other fiction nominees include Megha Majumdar’s “A Guardian and a Thief,” the follow-up to her celebrated debut from 2020, “A Burning”; Bryan Washington’s “Palaver” and the latest collection from acclaimed short story author Joy Williams, “The Pelican Child.”

Li’s “Things In Nature Merely Grow” opens with a painful acknowledgment, “There is no good way to say this,” as she attempts to make sense of the suicides of her two teenage sons. The author is also known for such prize-winning fiction as “The Book of Goose” and “Where Reasons End,” an imagined dialogue between a mother and her son, who has taken his own life.

Nonfiction nominees also include Julia Ioffe’s “Motherland,” a feminist history of Russia over the past century, and Claudia Rowe’s “Wards of the State,” which probes the American foster care system.

Han Kang’s “We Do Not Part,” translated from the Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, reflects upon the 1948-49 Jeju uprising, when the U.S.-backed South Korean government killed tens of thousands of rebels on Jeju Island. Jazmina Barrera’s “The Queen of Swords,” translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney; Hamid Ismailov’s “We Computers,” translated from the Uzbek by Shelley Fairweather-Vega; and Mohamed Kheir’s “Sleep Phase,” translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger, are among the other translation nominees.

Mahogany Browne’s “A Bird in the Air Means We Can Still Breathe” is a nominee in young people’s literature, a category which also features Ibi Zoboi’s “(S)kin,” K. Ancrum’s “The Corruption of Hollis Brown” and Amber McBride’s “The Leaving Room.” In poetry, the books include Patricia Smith’s “The Intentions of Thunder,” Esther Lin’s “Cold Thief Place,” Natalie Shapero’s “Stay Dead” and Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s “The New Economy.”

Hillel Italie, The Associated Press